The Writer's Job Is The Job Of

The Destination Of The Soul: This Is What I, Led On By Nils Holgersson, Came To Seek In The Literature Of Western Europe. I Fervently Hope That My Pursuit, As A Japanese, Of Literature And Culture Will, In Some Small Measure, Repay Western Europe For The Light It Has Shed Upon The Human Condition.

My Observation Is That After One Hundred And Twenty Years Of Modernisation Since The Opening Of The Country, Present-day Japan Is Split Between Two Opposite Poles Of Ambiguity.

Understanding Comes Hard To Persons Of High Rank Who Are Accustomed To Phony Lifestyles That Involve No Daily Work.

There Could Be Joy In Destruction, Too, Couldn't There? Isn't Jesus Christ's Second Coming Supposed To Occur Only After A Lot Of Unmitigated Destruction? But Again, Human History Is Fraught With Tragedies In Which Man Spared No Effort To Destroy With Millenarian Joy, Only To Learn That No Messiah Appeared Afterwards.

As I Grew Up, I Was Continually To Suffer Hardships In Different Realms Of Life - In My Family, In My Relationship To Japanese Society And In My Way Of Living At Large In The Latter Half Of The Twentieth Century.